Comment by forapurpose | Hacker News Reader

Comment by forapurpose | Hacker News Reader

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I'm not interested in your advice but I'm happy talk about the issues. That said, I'm not sure what you're saying or what you think I said.

Immigration is, I believe, a human right. It's liberty - liberty to travel, to make the most of yourself, and it's opportunity. People should be free to make the most of themselves. It's also economic freedom, which generally yields more productive economies for all.

For practical reasons, mostly to prevent the economic shocks of mass migrations, it needs to be somewhat limited and controlled. But I want the poorest, most oppressed people coming to my country; they are the ones who need freedom the most - the most marginal social and economic gain. I'm completely confident that they and their children will thrive and make my country better. And for practical and moral reasons, I'd like more diversity; the sooner we can do away with the dominance of any ethnic group, the sooner we can be rid of their BS bigotry, which is a drain on us all. (Imagine, for a moment, the world without bigots - so many problems solved.)

Exit makes sense as a human right. This is true across many levels of organization: you are free to quit your job, drop out of school, even emancipate yourself from your family after a certain age, and it's widely recognized that protecting the freedom to do these things improves collective outcomes.

A corollary is that you should be allowed to join organizations that want you.

But entry to any organization, regardless of whether they want you or not? In a world where Google has to hire everyone who applies, or Stanford has to admit everyone, or families have to house and feed anyone who shows up at their doorstep even when they don't want to, you no longer have a Google or a Stanford or a family functioning anywhere close to its current level. "Entry to anywhere as a human right" is an idea which may be initially attractive due to its simplicity, but the only people I know who stick with it after further thought appear more interested in harming groups of people they don't like than trying to lift up everyone.

And as a practical matter, for all of its flaws, the US has nevertheless done more than any other country over the last 7 decades to enforce a right of exit across most of the globe. A more diverse and stronger US would be an improvement, yes, and I'm pretty sure Canada/Australia-style immigration policy will get us there. But there are ways to become more diverse and weaker, too; and importantly, in that world, bigotry is even further from being solved, because the probable leading superpower is a more bigoted, monoracial China. (In contrast, when the City College of New York ceased to be a top-tier institution, the damage was fortunately limited to just itself; other top universities had ended anti-Jewish admissions practices some years earlier.) You seem completely blind to this danger.

I'm not talking about private business. I'm not sure how that got into the conversation.

Private business was just one of several examples I gave to illustrate principles which hold across a wide range of scales of human organization.

It is straightforward to verify that they don't stop holding at nation-scale. A good place to start is Lee Kuan Yew, who's both one of the only leaders in history to preside over the entire transition from Third World to First World for millions of people, and an architect of what's currently the most open immigration policy among Chinese-majority states. Singapore is a multicultural place whose government is widely acknowledged to have one of the best technocratic track records in the world, and they spent considerable effort on trying to get immigration policy right, iterating through alternatives while deliberately taking a popularity hit; what were their conclusions?

Or what are the odds, under your stated worldview, that two of the closest things to actual open borders existing in 2018 are (i) the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard, which lets almost anyone stay as long as they can support themselves ...but ranges from 74 to 81 degrees N latitude, and (ii) the United Arab Emirates, which has more than five times as many expats as actual citizens, the largest number from India ...but ruthlessly maintains a two-tiered society, where even people who were born in the UAE and have lived there their entire lives are exceedingly unlikely to be granted citizenship unless they are Arab?

Contrary to claims that nothing like open borders has ever been tried, the existence of cases like this make it abundantly clear that this area of policy space has already been subject to substantial exploration. And every surviving result has an obvious and unusual force that does something similar to what traditional immigration controls accomplish in most countries, such as Svalbard's -40C winters. This is, to put it mildly, not a likely result if traditional immigration controls no longer have a useful function.

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